Mountain Expedition Adventure Race
Montana 2007
Well, Dave and I decided to pit ourselves against another multi-day adventure race. The setting for this new adventure was the beautiful mountains around Bozeman, MT, just north of Yellowstone. The trip there was scenic but uneventful – which is exactly how I wanted it. We were joined by our all-star crew member Ken, whose help and guidance would prove invaluable.
I will try and lay out the basics here, but I should preface everything by saying that this was a rather intense experience and it is tough to convey even a small portion of what you experience physically, emotionally and mentally. There were countless annoyances and discomforts: bruises, cuts, dust, aches, blisters, sunburn, hunger, thirst, cold, exhaustion . . . the list goes on and on. Getting through the race really is a process of managing and minimizing suffering. However, the flip side was even richer. While I’m sure I have already forgotten half of it, there were great moments of euphoria as well. We constantly encountered amazing vistas, wildflowers, woodland creatures, beautiful sunrises, scented breezes, good laughs, good camaraderie, and deep, deep satisfaction. It was truly odd how one moment I would vow never to do this again, and the next moment I wished I could just keep racing.
Leg 1 - Trek
We got the basic course layout the day before things kicked off and I must say it was daunting; very long legs and dense contour lines (i.e. lots of hills!). I had a bad night of sleep before the race. I’m not sure if it was nerves, the snoring of my roommates or the fact that I was use to going to sleep late, but I spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling. Things kicked off early the next morning with what we initially thought would be a 15-18hr trek. It ended up taking us well over 20hrs. The gun went off and many teams sprinted off, Dave and I settled into a comfortable trekking pace, which turned out to be a middle of the pack speed. We climbed and climbed as the sun came and up and the heat that would become our constant companion began to say hello. Only a few hours into the race we were all alone. We encountered many unmarked trails and wasted a ton of time and energy climbing around to find the best route. Eventually we decided just to achieve the Bridger ridge and hope for a decent climber’s trail. A few hours and several thousand vertical feet later we were overlooking half of Montana and enjoying quick travel along the spine of the Bridger mountain range. One route option would have been to try and follow the ridgeline for the next 18 miles to our next checkpoint, but there were several major peaks and potentially impassable cliffs in the way. While it turned out to be a mistake, we wanted to play it safe and dropped back down into an adjacent valley and a known trail. This ultimately meant we suffered through much more elevation gain and loss as well as oppressive heat. First Dave and then I ran out of water. As our blood thickened we slowed down dramatically to the point where Dave began to suffer from severe dehydration. He had headaches, dizziness, weakness and very little sweat. These are all real bad signs. I have been around renal failure before and know how serious it can be. Luckily we stumbled our way to a small spring and reloaded on water. After a 30 minute rest, we were back on the trail up to CP3.
It is about here where I realized just how big this trekking section was. We still had 10-15 miles to our next checkpoint which included lots of elevation change and at least 4 miles of steep scree filled cross country travel and then another 7-10 miles back to the Transition Area. Asides from battling the heat, we flew through the next 7 miles of beautiful trail and stumbled our way up, around and down some dramatic peaks to reach CP 4 on the edge of a dry lake bed. We reloaded our water bladders out of a magical stream that popped right out of a cave on the edge of a cliff and began a brutal off trail climb to regain some maintained trails and our route home. Travel became slow and difficult and navigation became a challenge. We were struggling up a hill that I hoped to crest before sundown to get a clear lay of the land on the other side before sunset, but the long day and dehydration had really sapped Dave’s energy. I ran ahead and waited for Dave to catch up. He reached me and we noted that this day alone was one of the most brutal treks we have ever done. The fact that this was just the first 18 hours of a 5 day race seemed ridiculous. We questioned our sanity, but really had no choice but to push on as I was almost out of food and we were not prepared for a night out at elevation. We followed a bearing in the dark for miles until we hit a creek we could follow down to the trail out. The next 8 miles down were long, but fairly quick with the exception of a few stops to scare the cattle out of our way and skirt a few muddy ponds. We were the last team in, totally spent and in desperate need of food and a little sleep. It is tough to estimate our total distance, somewhere between 35-40 miles and a lot of climbing. Looking at the map now, I would estimate at least 15,000 feet of gain/loss.
Leg 2 - Bike
Dave caught a few hours of sleep, while I shivered in an “ultra-light” sleeping bag, which could just as easily be called “ultra-useless.” Despite all the heat, it got damn cold at night, particularly up high. At sunrise we loaded up our bikes and set off into a maze of trails and fireroads. Much of the singletrack was silky smooth, fast and fun. They also had a bunch of annoying bump fields and some slow technical rocky sections. This area had a ton of roads and trails not on the map as well as labeled passages that no longer existed. This made for some tough navigation. You really had to watch your bearing, pacing and natural features. Apparently, a bunch of the teams in front of us spent half a day biking in circles and a few just gave up on the checkpoint completely. Anyway, after a broken chain and a flat tire, we made our way down to CP6. The next 30-40 miles were fast. Mostly gravel roads, mostly downhill. We hit some ugly headwinds, broke another chainlink and suffered through some bad washboards and heat. After CP8 things got interesting again. We followed a creek for a while and I recall countless numbers of orange and purple butterflies clouding up the trail. Then things got steep. We encountered the first of what would be a number of awful hike-a-bike sections. The first was basically a steep ravine chocked full of microwave size boulders. It would have been tough to hike in bike shoes alone, but pulling your 35lb sled with you made it down right miserable. We eventually topped out and enjoyed some rocky, rolling terrain for the next 5 miles and some fast downhill after that. After biking completely off-road through waist high grass for a good mile, we reached a beautiful little lake and some real fireroads once again. We worked our way down to where we hoped to find “Wild Horse Pass” trail. After pinpointing the exact spot where the trail was shown on the map, we found nothing but a cliff of trees and shrubs. I was confident that we were in the right place and the trail just no longer existed. Dave wanted to search around a bit more, but he found nothing. The next three hours were spent climbing 1,000+ vertical feet on steep forested terrain. It was an absolute low point for me. My bike started to become very awkward and heavy, the bush got thicker and the hill just never seemed to end. Eventually we reach the ridge and started searching desperately for the remains of the trail down the other side. It was getting dark and another 6 hours of bikewhacking would have just destroyed us. It is at this point that I started to have serious doubt about our ability to continue the race. However, after some unorganized searching we found the old trails and with great joy flew down the hill the next 10 miles to the transition area. Apparently the trail we were looking for exists, but is marked way wrong on the maps. Another day long leg, but we were catching up on many of the other teams. We probably covered about 60-75 miles of hilly terrain, but we walked at least 5 of those and carried our bikes for at least 2 miles.
Leg 3/4 – Trek/Bike
We ate some canned ravioli, drank a ton of fluids and slept for an hour or so. After regearing and treating our battered feet, we headed off for a 16 mile trek with two mountain passes. This is where we seemed to find our rhythm. We power hiked through the night and nailed all the navigation. The views were simply amazing and there were endless fields of wildflowers. The terrain was rocky, but quite pleasant. The bugs were not too bad and there were not too many prickly plants. We almost ran that last five miles down from a mountain pass to the transition area. To our surprise a number of teams had already lost teammates due to the grueling terrain and perhaps starting out too quickly. Four teams were already disqualified and a number of others had missed checkpoints. As we were getting our bikes ready for the next leg we noted that there were three other teams still in the TA. This meant that despite our troubles over the first few days we were now in a position to grab second or third place. With new energy we hit the next bike leg and worked our way to a tricky CP. It was off trail on the summit of one peak in a series of peaks along a ridge. We bounced around for 20 minutes and then found it and zipped off to the next point. Word was that a number of teams struggled to find this point. After a superfast singletrack descent to the valley floor we found CP14. There was a sign-in sheet here and it appeared that only two ranked teams had signed in before us. We went from last to 3rd in 24 hours! Another broken chain link and a 12 mile hill climb in mid 90s heat back into the mountains was all that was left for this leg. We powered into the next TA and put in what I would imagine was one of the fastest times for the bike section. However, we didn’t get too excited as we knew a monster trek awaited us.
Leg 5 – Trek
After a futile attempt to sleep, which was odd considering I had only slept for maybe two hours in the previous two days, we packed up for a ~40 mile trek, in very mountainous terrain. Our feet were hurting, but apparently not at bad as some teams. After a quick bike ride to the trailhead, we passed another team tending to their aching feet. We made great time over the next 8 mile climb to the top of Hyalite peak. Through a nasty wind we watched the sun disappear from 10,300ft and put on some layers for the 20+ mile ridgeline walk we had in front of us.
As we made our way along the ridgeline we began to realize just how long this night might be. Nasty wind gusts and rain began to pound us. As long as we kept moving we stayed warm, but once you stopped the weather just sapped out all of your heat in a hurry. It was a bit odd walking along a mountain ridge late at night with a strong cloud cover. You knew the land just fell away from you on both sides, but you couldn’t really see anything. It was almost as though you were just walking on a bridge through the clouds. There were a few tough navigation spots given that it was very difficult to track our progress or identify landmarks, but we moved along smoothly. As the weather continued to decline and our progress slowed, we thought we might as well bunker down and see if we can sleep for an hour and wait for things to improve. The landscape was pretty barren but we did find a small nest of gnarled trees to curl up under. We put on every stitch of clothing we had and used our backpacks and maps as a wind shield, but we still couldn’t get warm enough to sleep. Dave was even shivering, and if you know David you know he never gets cold. We tried spooning for a while, but there was really no way to get comfortable in this type of exposure, so off we went. We marched along in the darkness for miles until we encountered something odd on the side of the trail. It was another team hunkered under a space blanket. They had been lost since sunset, climbing all the adjacent peaks to find the correct route. We knew the maps were not always accurate, but based on our estimated location we followed a bearing in the general direction of the trail. In no time we were right on course. I couldn’t really understand the other team’s confusion, but people do get a little loopy after a few days of no sleep. We dropped into a protected valley and thought this warmer spot might be a good location to catch some sleep. After hauling around a space blanket for innumerable trips, I finally decided to give the thing a shot. Useless. Completely useless. I couldn’t even begin to unfold the thing without it tearing into little pieces. Well, you know what that meant . . . more spooning. After another restless 45 minutes, Dave began to shiver again and we realized that we just were not going to get any sleep and might as well march through the weather. We walked through the night, up and down peaks. There was a light rain, but the wind was so strong that it dried you off as the rain fell. The wind had chapped our faces so badly by sunrise that my lips were bleeding. It was damn good to see light once again. We had a few navigational scares, but were basically right on course and near CP 17 at about 8:00am. At this point my feet had gone from painful to numb. As I type this a week later I still have an odd numb sensation on the ball of my right foot. I also had a little chaffing scare so I walked a few miles with my pants down to let the breeze dry everything out down there. We finally hit CP17 and unfolded the giant map only to see that we had at least another 10 miles and lots of elevation gain and loss to get down the kayak transition area. There was not much you could do but laugh. At this point we were moving fast. Not because we were racing, but simply because we wanted this leg to be over! I got some water out of a nasty stagnant puddle on the way out, but other than that we basically power-hiked the whole way. There wasn’t much conversation, we were both in our own world. The worst section was a two mile stretch where we dropped 3,000 feet. The steep hills were brutal on sore knees and already thrashed quad muscles. More odd navigation and eventually we hit the basin and found a creek that led us into the transition area. We waded through a few streams and gave a little blood to the biting flies as we endured the last 2 miles, which were some damn long miles.
Ken was there at CP 18 to greet us with a great smile and plenty of racing news. Most of the teams had been cut off and had been “short coursed” around the leg we just did. Furthermore, teams still on that leg would be cut off from the next kayaking section as they would be coming in too late. This kind of created an odd situation for us. We were only the second team with all teammates still racing to make through all of the checkpoints to CP 18, which basically meant we were in second place. Also, since the other teams had been rerouted or would be cutoff from the kayaks, we were essentially secure in that position no matter what happened from there forward. We still wanted to kayak and do the ropes course that was half-way through the kayak leg. After that, sleep was an absolute must. I basically had about 4 hours of sleep over the previous four days of racing.
We had to portage our boat about a quarter of a mile to the river. This wouldn’t be so bad, except we had loaded the boat down with food, water and supplies. Plus, we were just done walking for a while. Ken had told us that the fastest boats on the river were inflatables. I couldn’t really understand this until I saw the water. It was really low. There were rocks sticking out everywhere. The second Dave and I sat in the boat we just sank to the bottom and stopped. After a lot of prodding, pushing and pulling we were able to make some progress, but it was slow. We were constantly bouncing off rocks and dragging the bottom. I think Dave spent more time bailing out the boat than paddling. We just couldn’t keep the water out as we sank lower and lower. We hit the shore and dumped the water only to find the boat full a few minutes later. We knew it was just a matter of time until we went completely in. We hit a large rock that spun the boat sideways as the current tipped us over. We were instantly filled with water and I slipped out of the boat and grabbed the hull to keep it from being pulled away from us down stream. Luckily the boat was pinned and balanced on the large rock that we hit. Unluckily, my paddle and some of our food got swept downstream. After some awkward coordinated efforts we were able to get the boat to the shore. We made a few more attempts to run the river, but it was clear that with our boat there was not way we were going to make it short of dragging the boat the next 25 miles. So, in a somewhat anticlimactic finish we beached the gear and called it a day. Ultimately, the low water level ended up being a major problem for all teams and the course was dramatically changed to accommodate the problem.
Finish
Given that only one complete team made it through the course, I must say that this was a tough race. I really liked the long, pure demanding legs. It added a lot of the “adventure” back into adventure racing. While we did not complete the full course, I was definitely satisfied. We got in over 100 miles of rigorous mountain trekking, over 100 miles of biking and while the paddling left something to be desired, we did get wet! My hat goes off to the race directors and all the support personnel.
Thanks again Ken for your great crew work. Thanks Dave for being a great teammate. And thanks to all my friends and family for the support of this odd passion.
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